In many areas, especially in developing parts of the world, very high population density areas frequently surround streams which carry highly polluted water to larger streams, rivers, oceans, lakes, and/or the like. As a result of the high population density, land is very expensive, making it expensive to acquire land for, and to build, waste water treatment facilities in areas where the waste streams are generated. Therefore, in many areas, drainage canals channel waste water streams from these densely populated areas, with no treatment whatsoever of the waste water, into running streams, rivers, lakes, oceans, and/or the like. As a result, all the streams become polluted rather than merely the ones flowing from the very densely populated areas. This results in very unhygienic conditions in all the streams. Further, untreated waste streams may be created from various industries or other sources in the areas.
There are several commercial water and waste water treatment processes in use all over the world that utilize various forms of water treatment processes for purification of water and waste water treatment streams. Such processes may be designed for selective treatment of parameters such as biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, fecal coliform, oil and grease, total suspended solids, and dissolved oxygen, and further, such processes may be used in conventional techniques including coagulation, clarification, purification, aeration, generic or specially formulated enzymes, and various disinfection techniques to achieve specific limited goals in treating such contaminated waste water streams. In most of these cases the conventional processes require significant amounts of financial resources and several months, even years, of planning. Such projects require the acquisition of land to construct such processes, and incur engineering costs, construction costs, and the procurement of process components, including pumps, piping, valves, instruments, controls, and associated costs for construction, maintenance, permitting, and operation of such systems.
In most of the conventional processes the unit operations require performance in separate process zones such as ponds with pond liners, concrete basins, process reaction tanks made from expensive materials of construction and the like. Such processes also require additional costs associated with more space for installing more equipment and many years of project engineering. Some technologies exist for cleaning rivers and ponds by utilizing both trash strainers or the like for trash removal, or oil skimmers for skimming oil.
In view of the foregoing, what is needed is a waste water treatment process which is more space efficient and economical than conventional technologies permit which is, for example, not a trash removal process, an oil skimming process alone, or an air bubbling process alone.